Read: Traditional bullying

Certain characteristics inherent in online technologies increase the likelihood that they will be exploited for deviant purposes.^[9] Unlike physical bullying, electronic bullies can remain virtually anonymous using temporary email accounts, pseudonyms in chat rooms, instant messaging programs, cell-phone text messaging, and other Internet venues to mask their identity; this perhaps frees them from normative and social constraints on their behavior.

Additionally, electronic forums often lack supervision. While chat hosts regularly observe the dialog in some chat rooms in an effort to police conversations and evict offensive individuals, personal messages sent between users (such as electronic mail or text messages) are viewable only by the sender and the recipient, thereby falling outside the regulatory reach of such authorities. In addition, when teenagers know more about computers and cellular phones than their parents or guardians, they are therefore able to operate the technologies without concern that a parent will discover their experience with bullying (whether as a victim or offender).

Another factor is the inseparability of a cellular phone from its owner, making that person a perpetual target for victimization. Users often need to keep their phone turned on for legitimate purposes, which provides the opportunity for those with malicious intentions to engage in persistent unwelcome behavior such as harassing telephone calls or threatening and insulting statements via the cellular phone’s text messaging capabilities. Cyberbullying thus penetrates the walls of a home, traditionally a place where victims could seek refuge from other forms of bullying. Compounding this infiltration into the home life of the cyberbully victim is the unique way in which the internet can “create simultaneous sensations of exposure (the whole world is watching) and alienation (no one understands).”^[15] For youth who experience shame or self-hatred, this effect is dangerous because it can lead to extreme self-isolation.

One possible advantage for victims of cyberbullying over traditional bullying is that they may sometimes be able to avoid it simply by avoiding the site/chat room in question. Email addresses and phone numbers can be changed; in addition, most email accounts now offer services that will automatically filter out messages from certain senders before they even reach the inbox, and phones offer similar caller ID functions.

However, this does not protect against all forms of cyberbullying. Publishing of defamatory material about a person on the internet is extremely difficult to prevent and once it is posted, many people or archiving services can potentially download and copy it, at which point it is almost impossible to remove from the Internet. Some perpetrators may post victims’ photos, or victims’ edited photos featuring defaming captions or pasting victims’ faces on nude bodies. Examples of famous forums for disclosing personal data or photos to “punish” the “enemies” include the Hong Kong Golden Forum, Livejournal, and more recently JuicyCampus. Despite policies that describe cyberbullying as a violation of the terms of service, many social networking Web sites have been used to that end.^[16]

Cyberbullying is sometimes used by the targets of bullying to retaliate against their bullies, since factors such as anonymity, absence of the bully’s supporting friends, and irrelevancy of physical strength in the online environment, make it safer to counterattack the bully by that means. Nancy E. Willard notes in Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats, “Unfortunately, students who retaliate against bullies online can be mistakenly perceived as the source of the problem. This can be especially true under circumstances where the original victimization left no tangible evidence, but the cyberbullying did.”^[17]